#I started watching IWAV and it got me having feelings about fucked up immortals again

[lacreni]

Honestly the only thing keeping me focused on editing Escaping Perdition rather than switching to work on Liminea stuff is that all the Liminea stuff I'm excited about is in like... book four.

There's a kingdom with a royal family that consists entirely of immortal trickster spirits that makes me insane every time I think about it. These people have grudges and family drama and politics all mashed up into a horrible, intricate mess that goes back several hundred years.

Their god-king-all-father is the legendary Reynard the Fox, and they all love and worship and hate him. They're raised from birth on the expectation that they will eat anyone weaker than them and outsmart and kill anyone stronger than them, which isn't a big ask because they've all inherited Reynard's insatiable nature and are literally incapable of experiencing being Not Hungry or Not Bored for longer than a few minutes, no matter how much they eat or how much they do.

The only way to kill them in a way that matters is to consume them, and if you try it you better be strong as hell because if you're too weak they'll just consume you from the inside and take over your body. The only reason there are hundreds of them and not thousands is because they keep eating each other.

They ran out of lands and titles hundreds of years ago but they keep having children, so they keeping having to decide between breaking off a piece of their own land (lol no mine), starting a war with a neighboring country (they already took over all the easy ones), or risk having their own child turn against them and try to take what is theirs (awkward).

They keep having demi-mortal bastards to staff their castles and palaces because they won't trust anyone who isn't family to keep their treasuries and cook their food but they can't trust a fellow pure-breed not to try and take their lands and titles away from him. They love the half-breeds because they're capable of being loving and trustworthy, but they despise them for being weak. Demi-mortals are essentially disposable. They'd kill entire nations to protect them.

And the halfbreeds. Who do you want to work for, for the rest of time, your half-sibling or your parent? When do you stop calling him dad and start calling him my lord? When will your half-brother forgive you for not having a black hole inside of you? For being so much easier to love? When will you forgive him for being smarter and stronger and of higher station than you? When he hands you the crown to put away in the vault, do you ever try it on and stare at yourself in the mirror, feeling just a little fraction of that insatiable hunger gnawing at the edges of your soul?

They're family, but are they even capable of loving you or are you just a tool? They've given you everything you've ever asked for. You're too scared of them to ask for anything you don't think they'd be willing to give you. They can kill and eat people like you without even breaking a sweat and they won't even bother to wipe the blood from their mouths after.

It's been a few centuries and your hair is going gray but your grandmother looks like she's in her thirties. You can feel yourself slowly winding down, and when your father and your brother look at you it's with terror and disgust. They don't want you to leave but they can't make you stay. They can always make another when you're gone. They will be so insatiable for your missing company they will devour your corpse. It will not satisfy them. Centuries later they will think of you and bite themselves because their blood almost, almost tastes like you. It will not satisfy them.

Nothing ever can.